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Known Donor Agreement Approved!

It wasn’t until my wife and I actually created our donor agreement (only a few days before meeting with our donor to hash it out) that the fear struck me — our donor might not be OK with our stipulations and might back out, leaving us nearly back at square one with our baby making plans.

But that didn’t happen! We had dinner with our donor and his partner (and their kid) last night to talk business. We brought printouts of the agreement for each person to read over carefully, and we discussed each item thoroughly. Some of the items in the agreement felt uncomfortable for us to ask because the “legalese” made it sound very cold and impersonal. Luckily, discussing our way through the agreement enabled us to say things like “we hate how harsh this sounds, but here is how this item would protect both us and you while still allowing for some leeway”.

Our donor agreement is 5 pages long and covers the following topics:

The sperm and insemination process

including how many donations we request per cycle

and STI testing for our donor

Parenting and parental rights

including a statement that the donor agrees to assist us with second parent adoption

Roles and Relationships

including our appointment of a guardian

the donor’s relationship with the child

extended family relationships

and that the donor agrees to maintain contact with us in case the child has questions about their genetic lineage/medical history

If anyone wants to see a copy of our contract to use as inspiration for their own, I am happy to share.

I kind of can’t believe this is really happening. My wife and I have been on a rollercoaster of “will we/won’t we/when will we” for almost a year. Getting the donor agreement signed was the last real excuse for not starting the process of actually “trying to conceive” (although for a lesbian couple I think the fertility appointments, deciding on a donor and a form of assisted reproduction, and all of the other “planning” stages feel like part of the TTC process).

Last night we went over our mental list of accoutrement – syringes, sterile cups, and pre-seed. I’m not sure about trying softcups yet. I ordered pre-seed from amazon (holy expensive!!). We will give our donor a box of pre-seed to help with the extraction of the goods, because we heard that sperm donations shouldn’t be made using traditional lubricants or saliva. It is all coming together. If anyone has recommendations of where to get cheap syringes and sterile collection cups, I’m all ears!

Thanks, Starkmans is definitely the cheapest for specimen cups of all the places we’ve looked.
Can I ask what kind of syringe you used? We have no idea how much semen we will be getting or what size syringe is best, and if the little lock-tip on some of them would be a problem or not.

I went to Costco last night and asked the pharmacist if they had sterile specimen cups and oral medicine syringes and the guy chuckled and looked at me knowingly… I feel like he knew why I was asking for such a specific combination of medical supplies. But alas, they don’t sell those kinds of things anymore, and he said that Shoppers Drugmart doesn’t anymore either. I was thinking of trying a Walmart pharmacy, but I should add Zehrs to the list, too!

We skipped the sterile specimen cup and just used softcups (from Shoppers). We had our KD actually use the softcup for his, uh, specimen, and then we syringed as much as we could close to the cervix and then inserted the softcup with the dregs. Seemed to work well and eliminated wastage from transferring the stuff around.

Not silly at all – this kind of how-to info is not readily accessible, as far as I can tell. It took a lot of internet research (i.e., reading people’s blogs) to figure out what equipment we needed for at home artificial insemination.
I ended up finding the right syringes at Walmart – the pharmacy gave me two for free. I am assuming I can go back every month and get 2 more each time… They are 10ml oral medicine syringes, so they don’t have a needle on them. They just have a smooth tip, and it took me a while to find ones without the locking mechanism on the tip that the needle would lock into. I will post pictures of all of the supplies when we have everything together.

Oh okay! Thanks for the info!! I was just curious bc I have a few new syringes left from our injections that I would have gave you for free but they have the part at the end to screw the needle on. I’m glad you found them though. If you end up needing them and have a U.S. address I can send them to (I saw you’re in Canada) email me hereggsmynest@gmail.com. Can’t wait to hear more abt your journey. We are switching to AF next year and will probably be doing it at home for a few months so any tips you have would gladly help!

Thanks for the offer! I was able to get more for free from Walmart again. The only thing I haven’t been able to find easily is specimen cups… I asked for them at Shoppers Drug Mart, Walmart, Pharmasave, and some other local pharmacy and they all looked at me like I was crazy. Today I went into a laboratory services medical centre (where they actually take blood and urine and whatever else), and they gave me 5 cups, but reluctantly. When I asked for 5 the receptionist looked surprised and asked if I was selling them… Guess I will turn to online ordering when these 5 run out.

One other thing you may want to buy is a clear plastic speculum. Your wife can use it to look at your cervix and see if it is open and your cervical mucus is clear. It will also allow your wife to put the semen right onto the cervix, so it has as little swimming to do as possible. After insem, slowly, carefully remove the speculum so you don’t pull the sperm out too.

Thanks for the tip. I read about using a speculum on someone else’s blog once, but I didn’t want to over-medicalize the whole process. It can still feel a LITTLE bit romantic/sexy to inseminate with just a synringe… but who am I kidding – I care more about doing this right than trying to make an awkward process romantic! We might try that out for next month…